This invention relates to chewing gums and more particularly to chewing gums having longer lasting sweetness and flavor.
Commercially available chewing gums generally comprise a substantially water insoluble chewable gum base such as chicle, substitutes thereof, and the like. Incorporated within the gum base may be plasticizers or softeners to improve the texture of the gum, flavors, and sweeteners such as sugar or corn syrup or, for sugarless chewing gums, artificial sweetening agents such as saccharin.
One of the limitations of commercially available chewing gums is their rapid loss of both flavor and sweetness during chewing. Generally, this loss is encountered after about four to five minutes of chewing.
Also, it is found that sugarless chewing gums, while encountering similar flavor and sweetness loss after only a few minutes of chewing, also display a noticeably low initial perception of flavor and sweetness, and lack the strong, pleasant, sweet impact of sugar-containing chewing gums. Increasing the level of saccharin employed to produce a stronger sweetness impact has met with the disadvantage of imparting an extremely bitter aftertaste to the product. Other attempts to obtain a quick initial release of sweetness have resulted in the corresponding loss of long lasting flavor and sweetness effects.
It is accordingly an object of this invention to prepare a chewing gum having a longer lasting sweetness and flavor.
Another object of this invention is to prepare a sugarless chewing gum having a longer lasting sweetness and flavor while further having a substantial initial release of both sweetness and flavor.
These and other objects will become apparent upon reading the specification and claims which follow.